Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works eBook

But shaking himself with sudden disgust, Soames returned
to the path, and left that seeking for he knew not
what.

CHAPTER III

MEETING AT THE BOTANICAL

Young Jolyon, whose circumstances were not those of
a Forsyte, found at times a difficulty in sparing
the money needful for those country jaunts and researches
into Nature, without having prosecuted which no watercolour
artist ever puts brush to paper.

He was frequently, in fact, obliged to take his colour-box
into the Botanical Gardens, and there, on his stool,
in the shade of a monkey-puzzler or in the lee of
some India-rubber plant, he would spend long hours
sketching.

An Art critic who had recently been looking at his
work had delivered himself as follows:

“In a way your drawings are very good; tone
and colour, in some of them certainly quite a feeling
for Nature. But, you see, they’re so scattered;
you’ll never get the public to look at them.
Now, if you’d taken a definite subject, such
as ‘London by Night,’ or ’The Crystal
Palace in the Spring,’ and made a regular series,
the public would have known at once what they were
looking at. I can’t lay too much stress
upon that. All the men who are making great names
in Art, like Crum Stone or Bleeder, are making them
by avoiding the unexpected; by specializing and putting
their works all in the same pigeon-hole, so that the
public know pat once where to go. And this stands
to reason, for if a man’s a collector he doesn’t
want people to smell at the canvas to find out whom
his pictures are by; he wants them to be able to say
at once, ’A capital Forsyte!’ It is all
the more important for you to be careful to choose
a subject that they can lay hold of on the spot, since
there’s no very marked originality in your style.”

Young Jolyon, standing by the little piano, where
a bowl of dried rose leaves, the only produce of the
garden, was deposited on a bit of faded damask, listened
with his dim smile.

Turning to his wife, who was looking at the speaker
with an angry expression on her thin face, he said:

“You see, dear?”

“I do not,” she answered in her staccato
voice, that still had a little foreign accent; “your
style has originality.”

The critic looked at her, smiled’ deferentially,
and said no more. Like everyone else, he knew
their history.

The words bore good fruit with young Jolyon; they
were contrary to all that he believed in, to all that
he theoretically held good in his Art, but some strange,
deep instinct moved him against his will to turn them
to profit.

He discovered therefore one morning that an idea had
come to him for making a series of watercolour drawings
of London. How the idea had arisen he could
not tell; and it was not till the following year, when
he had completed and sold them at a very fair price,
that in one of his impersonal moods, he found himself
able to recollect the Art critic, and to discover
in his own achievement another proof that he was a
Forsyte.